


Under Rust, Not Far from the Raining Tree

by QadgopTheMercotan



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:29:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29911461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QadgopTheMercotan/pseuds/QadgopTheMercotan
Summary: Wrote this many years ago, clearly never going to do any more with it.  A walk in Marin County.  It happened, sort of.





	Under Rust, Not Far from the Raining Tree

My feet grew clammy as the very edge of the Pacific Ocean drifted over them, then back across the wet sand; the cuffs of my jeans coldly clung to my ankles, leeching the summer warmth. I didn't mind. I had never before crossed the continent, let alone seen a sea that was not the Atlantic, and this little bay at the edge of the woods felt entirely cut off from what I had left behind me some days before: the city, employment, family. The world, and all its deadness.

Beside and a little behind me, Kari waited, her shoes also in the water as it rolled back in. Her usual quiet, amused jumpiness had lessened here on the beach; but as I looked back to her she turned her face away a little, looking at me sidelong. She often did. Though she could be more straightforward when she wished, even blunt, there was an element to her that was always trying to decide, trying to decide, trying to decide. It was a quality that came out even in our correspondence, which had begun over some transient discussion on an Internet forum over a decade before; a quality which had made that correspondence strangely compelling, even when discussing trivialities; a quality with which I had felt no little resonance over the years as my life took its own increasingly unpredictable turns. Now that I had scraped together enough resources to finally visit her in the flesh, she seemed to have decided to give me a tour of the local geography--knowing next to nothing about the area, I had left our itinerary up to her--but I still had the sense that she was ready to change tracks at a moment's notice, that every moment we spent together here was still, somehow, contingent.

But for now her mind appeared made up, as she brushed a few dark strands from a thin almost-smile. "There's something else you might want to see. Come on, it's not too far. At least, if you can tear yourself away."

I laughed, hearing no meanness in the comment. "Yeah, I'm sorry. What can I tell you? I never thought I'd actually be here, seeing this." So far as I knew, no member of my family had ever been farther west than Pennsylvania. A minor thing, but it felt to me as though it mattered. To be touching water whose other side touched Asia...

Utterly irrelevant to any of the millions who lived in or routinely traveled to or from Asia, of course. Just new for me, and that was enough. I followed Kari back to her car.

It was a short drive to wherever we were going, but it passed through the terrifying little cliffside curves that are common in that area. I am not a driver, so I find it hard to picture myself calmly navigating those winding spaces where, far below, rocks or waters wait. Nor was I entirely calm as a passenger, though I did my best to hide this. But Kari showed only the blase of a driver long familiar with the area. She knew what she was doing. We arrived at a mountainside parking space, about halfway up, without incident. Then, by foot, she guided me up the nearest path to the mountain's top. In this, as with the drive, she showed no hesitation, no uncertainty. We made our way up a long, increasingly steep trail, greeting the very occasional passerby.

As we walked, she seemed to nod to herself.

Eventually she slowed, though there was still a good fifty feet or so of the incline ahead of us. She nodded ahead at a single tree jutting up from a patch of sparse foliage: a few surrounding bushes, a small irregular swatch of uncut grass. Actually there may have been more, obscured by the light mist that had risen around us, though the sun still shone brightly through it.

"Look at the tree," she said.

For a second I noticed only the leaves of the tree, moving slightly in the mist. And then it registered to me just what that movement was. It was raining in the tree--not over it or around it, but in it. The mist was condensing among those green fronds, and gravity was pulling the drops to whatever lay below them as more rain continuously formed to follow.

And again, as with the edge of the sea, it was as though there were no outside world. Only this existed, and it was more than enough. I felt glad to be alive--for me, an unusual thing, a weirdly thrilling one, like the feeling one gets in getting away with an impossibility.

"Thank you for sharing this," I whispered. Kari did not answer.

We reached the top of that nearby horizon, and there the ground leveled out into a flat plateau that spread farther into the distance than I could make out. I was all fired up now, eager to explore further, and Kari raised no objection, though she did look thoughtful. Here and there, some way ahead, were bits of broken masonry among the thinly-sprinkled trees--none of which were raining, perhaps because the mist was beginning to lift--and sparser grassy areas. Abandoned utilities? The place seemed neglected.

But not completely abandoned. I approached what looked like the remains of a stable of some kind, Kari trailing somewhat behind. Her footsteps in the earth--dry, here--were slower, almost hesitant, but she still came up to join me. A partial structure of cracked concrete walls stood before us, half open to the sky, the side facing us half gone; I could see that a few empty beer bottles stood or lay in the broken flooring within, recently left. The shack--because that was what it felt like, despite its construction materials and its multiple broken chambers--was pierced here and there by grooved metal piping stuck haphazardly into the walls and fragments of ceiling. A field of similar pipes surrounded the place, sticking directly out of the earth like a rusting half-grown orchard, though spaced widely enough that it was easy to walk between them and reach the walls themselves. If it had been a stable, I could not picture what sort of animals might have been held here, back when the place had solid walls. It didn't seem right to stuff horses' heads under the cramped roofs implied by what covering remained; but what else might have been needed up here? There was no sign of this once having been farmland, though admittedly more than one farm did quietly persevere not far from the mountain's foot, below.

I knew that I had to look more closely at the place, search around inside it. Why? Honestly, if someone had asked me the question (as Kari did not), I would have had no clear answer beyond curiosity. The ruin was odd enough that some bizarre apparition might not have been out of place, but no strange compulsion or voice in my head drew me forward. No, what followed was because of my choice alone.

While Kari seemed unsurprised by the place--she knew the area, so surely she had seen it before and had known it would be waiting for us--she made no move toward it until I did. Then she followed after me; in the space of the past few moments, our roles in the day's excursion had been exchanged, though this only later occurred to me. She voiced no objection, but did not--quite--share my sudden eagerness. I was not concerned about that. I still wonder why not, but I suppose I was simply too absorbed with the open chamber we were approaching to notice. The graffiti I could glimpse on one wall of the makeshift room looked too regular and ordered, like the inscriptions of inspirational phrases you find in memorials; and as in a memorials, its very careful placement on the wall aroused a desire to read it.

I stepped over the threshold, the jagged edge of a broken slab of concrete flooring, and was inside the walls. Sunshine shone warmingly in from behind me, so for a moment my own shadow obscured the writing on the wall. The flooring was not solely concrete; a large dusty mass of rust covered a large section of the floor, over which I cautiously made my way. Perhaps there had been metal piping or grillwork in the floor, since left to decay and now too far gone to identify. I heard Kari's footsteps as she slowly entered the room behind me, then scuffled into the rusty expanse. She still said nothing.

The flaky layer of rust was more widely spread than I had thought. The stain in the middle of the room was actually a dense clot that faded at its edges; a thin, barely visible sprinkling of the stuff covered the floor from wall to wall--or rather, to the open edge of the place. Leaning against one side, I checked one of my soles, and sure enough it was outlined in orange-brown shavings. I'll just dust them off back outside, I thought.

The writing on the wall looked to have been there for a very long time. Patches of dust obscured parts of it until I blew them away. I did not recognize the language. The letters were those of the familiar alphabet, but the words they spelled out were strange. Clashing consonants seemed to mash themselves together; apostrophes appeared in places where they made little sense.

"Do you see this?" I asked, looking back to Kari. She had stopped a few feet behind me, the ground under her feet still carpeted by the rust. There was an odd, even resigned look to her expression.

"Bored?" I asked her. "I thought you wanted to come here."

"Sure I did," she said quietly, but still with that strange resignation. I shrugged. I was enjoying myself, anyway. I peered more closely at the letters on the wall an started trying to sound them out. For all their jangled appearance, the words came easily.

Too easily: though there was no rhythm to the words' appearance to the eye, as I haltingly spoke them they took on a cadence I had not seen, a murky metrical pattern that I have never since been able to remember properly. The words, coming slowly and hesitantly at first, gradually took my attention over without my realizing it, took over my voice itself, and I did not notice at first when Kari whispered behind me.

"Wait."

I was halfway down the lines on the wall, and the spelled-out syllables were rolling over one another, rolling under one another, a wave coming in to wash the shore beneath my feet.

"Wait," Kari said behind me. "Don't finish."

But I was almost done, the words rolling forward and rolling forward, and it would be so much easier to simply finish them than to break away from the waves, undone...

"Stop," Kari said, her voice rising. "Don't--"

I finished the final line.

Something began to shine behind me, brightly and silently. For a moment I thought it was sunlight. But the angle was wrong, and within two heartbeats the radiance grew intense enough to wash away the details of my vision, scouring away the letters and casting my own too-sharp shadow over the space they had filled. I turned.

A ball of cold flame like magnesium burning, almost filling the room, stood raging without sound where Kari had been. Within it I could barely glimpse, in two or three strobe-like flashes before the light forced my eyes away, a figure whose upraised arms slowly moved down to its sides.

The unreality of this did not register for a few moments--what seemed a long time. It was the way you feel sometimes when presented with a line drawing, or even a photograph or moving image, at an odd angle or with a partially obscured view, without any advance knowledge of what the image is intended to signify. At a certain point you adjust and recognize the image for what it is, or someone simply explains it to you; and all at once the misconnecting lines and shadows fall together into something known, or at least something imaginable. But until that perceptual anchor-point arrives, you do not see what lies before you. The light of it hits your corneas, and the retinas beneath bring their uninterpreted sense-patterns to your brain; but you do not see. You stand instead in precarious unawareness, facing something unfaceable, something unknowable, something of which you do not even know to be afraid. And in that moment, neither the entity before you, nor you yourself as a conscious state of interaction with the world, can properly be said to exist.

But the moment passes, and when it does it is all too likely that the ancient animal who lives beneath your skin will rise again to a temporary dominance. Face that grunting, unthinking self with an image of something prosaic and mundane, and it sinks again before it can leave a mark, and you never notice its passing. Face it with something more disturbing--an extreme closeup of something you fear, perhaps--and you feel it physically reverberate within, even as your conscious intellect smashes it down. But face it with something to which it cannot relate, some breakage in the basic substance of the world, and for a time the animal may subsume any trace of the thinking framework with which you self-identify.

Or so it seems. Because in my next conscious memory after the silence of that blazing place where Kari had been, I am already in the midst of running, have been running for some time, down the mountainside path that Kari and I had ascended. But it is not the same path, cannot be. The foliage has been blackened and broken as if by some great fire; the splintery, carbonized stumps of trees are denuded; brown husks of grass crackle into dust under my feet where they have not already been scoured away. There is no mist, but a dry haze covers all. I realize I have already passed by the place where the raining tree stood, and only now remember what I have seen has replaced it: thin deformed fingers of desiccated wood, the pleading hand of a corpse against the colorless sky. I flee far beyond the mountain, and every place I come to is the same.

Much later, I reach the spot where the edge of the ocean had been. There is no ocean. A vast expanse of dry, cracked earth stretches forever away.


End file.
